Date: Sunday, August 5th 2018
Location: Stroud Mall Cinemark Theater
Time: 11am
Party: 2 (my sister and I)
Director: Marc Forester (interesting array of credits, but "Finding Neverland" tells me he was the right director for this because they deal with similar themes)
Writers: (too many to list LOL, but have to give credit to A.A. Milne and Ernest Shepard for giving us these beloved characters in the first place)
Composer: Jon Brion and Geoff Zanelli
Cast:
Christopher Robin- Ewan McGregor
Evelyn- Hayley Atwell
Madeline- Bronte Carmichael
Giles Winslow- Mark Gatiss (he played Mycroft to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock? fascinating...)
Eeyore- Brad Garrett
Pooh and Tigger- Jim Cummings
Owl- Toby Jones
Piglet- Nick Mohammad
Rabbit- Peter Capaldi
Kanga- Sophie Okonedo
Roo- Sara Sheen
Duration: 104 minutes (+ 7 trailers... seems to be a trend at this theater, always 7 trailers...)
Write-up:
Introduction
Gotta say it is CREEPY at the mall this early on a Sunday. None of the stores are open and there's almost nobody around. The theater had a decent amount of people, maybe 15-20 and there weren't as many kids as I expected.
Kinda funny how I'm doing all this build-up with the stuff in the movie and the trailers as well, but the movie discussion itself, I'm probably not going to go into too much detail about.
The two of us had been seeing trailers for this for months and have wanted to see it. It's oddly been really difficult to get me to a theater lately because a) it's more than 5 minutes down the road like our old theater was and b) nothing out there holds any interest for me anymore... almost like RDJ's Sherlock where he's in his flat for a couple months after the Lord Blackwood case
Coming Attractions
House With a Clock in the Walls
...first of all, WORDY title, bleck! The PG rating says it was for sorcery, so I thought this would be another Fantastic Beasts trailer... nope, a kid goes to live with his uncle, Jack Black, and he learns about magic and there's apparently a clock in the wall just ticking away. I thought this would be like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart (although I think that's actually about a beating heart under floorboards... I never read the story as you can probably tell). There's a funny line in the trailer where there's this older woman in the house (I called her a Helen Mirren type) and she says something and Jack Black is like "that [some inanimate object I can't remember] talked" acting all surprised and crap in the usual Jack Black way. I was thinking I hadn't really seen him in any live action movie in some time. And the last one I remember seeing a trailer for was Goosebumps... funny thing about that...
Goosebumps 2
I didn't think the first movie did well enough to merit a sequel... I guess studios really are running out of ideas... there was a girl in this trailer wearing an Emma Swan red leather jacket and I really thought it was Jennifer Morrison from Once Upon a Time... nope, it's a younger actress I'd seen a few times before. I think she was a werewolf in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows and the Carrie remake. The story is about two boys finding a book that was never published and probably should have stayed locked away... you know where this is going... all Jumanji style, the characters from the books come alive and terrorize the town.
A-X-L
I thought this would be yet another Transformers movie (knock it off, Michael Bay, nobody cares anymore!) but it's a little closer to today's technology. A teenager finds a mechanical dog in a junkyard, but it has intelligence and can learn/obey commands kinda like Alexa, but without it taking back. And of course it's something developed by the government that they want back... the concept is interesting, but the storyline has been done before.
Wonder Park
I'm not entirely sure what this one is even about. It seems to be about a girl who's traveling alone in the woods and she finds a hidden theme park and she's tasked with bringing people back to it. And somehow this is being done by some studio other than Disney cuz this kinda looks like Fantasy Land from Disneyworld without it being Disney.
Smallfoot
Cute concept- it's about a society of Yetis (Bigfoot) in the mountains and to them, we (smallfoot) are legends. Then a hiker gets lost and one Yeti finds him and tells the others. But they don't believe him so he goes to find the humans and world collide. At least this one is kinda original and it seems to have a cast of well-known actors (none of which I can remember at the moment... man, this is really becoming a cynical post)
Dumbo
I'd heard this one was coming... directed by Tim Burton and supposedly the Internet went nuts when this trailer first came out. It's the first time I'm seeing it. It's very much a teaser trailer that only lasts maybe a minute with not much dialogue. We see Dumbo come out of the hay and his ears are huge. He's found by two kids and their dad is Colin Farrell (he's been popping up a lot lately in these types of movies... interesting, but in a good way). And they show Dumbo's mom Jumbo being carted off in a trailer and the two kids have to take care of him. Then the trailer ends as we see Dumbo about to take flight for the first time at the circus. I noticed that there is no Timothy the Mouse, who taught him to fly in the original cartoon... I don't know if they're doing this movie without him or what... but I kinda feel like he's a vital character.
Ok, I actually looked this up... there are no other animal characters in this... no Timothy or anyone else... it's focusing on the human perspective... :sigh: not sure how I feel about that. I only saw this movie maybe once in my life and for a kid, it's kinda traumatic where Jumbo gets shackled one foot at a time when she attacks kids for bullying Dumbo and she gets carted away somewhere and he's left alone. The humans in that movie were terrible characters... Tim Burton is also an interesting idea... I don't know how he and Danny Elfman will make this movie their own. But if they do the scene with the pink elephants on parade, where Dumbo gets drunk or something, it'd be extra creepy. I think Nostalgia Critic listed that as one of his "top 10 nostalgic mindf***s"
Mary Poppins Returns
We get to see a little more in this than the teaser trailers, but not much more. It starts with a kite that gets caught up in the wind and finds a boy and his father and they take it for a flight. And Mary Poppins comes down holding it, opposed to her umbrella. And there's one scene where Emily Blunt goes by a mirror and her reflection mocks her when she walks away.
Maybe it's the music playing in the background from the movie, but I was almost getting teary with this one the way I did with the Beauty & the Beast trailer... omg, that was so good! I'm not nearly as nostalgic about Mary Poppins, but I have a really good feeling about this movie. And Emily Blunt is sure to get great in this role.
Ok, that's one that looks interesting to me... scratch my initial statement...
The Main Event
Synopsis
So we start how we often do: Christopher Robin with his friends and they're preparing to say goodbye to each other, but they all promise not to forget each other.
We start to flash forward and we're treated to a montage of Christopher Robin growing up. He's in private school and his father suddenly passes away so he must become the man of the house. He meets his future wife, goes off to war and eventually comes back to a 3-year old daughter and he works for a luggage company as head of logistics. He more or less becomes a workaholic who doesn't spend any time with his family.
Enter Winnie the Pooh, who finds the magic portal Christopher Robin once came through and they meet for the first time in maybe 20-30 years. Christopher Robin is forced to work over the weekend to solve a logistics issue so a huge chunk of the workforce isn't laid off, which is why he misses more time with Evelyn and Madeline. And meeting Pooh, of course he's in a rush to get him home so he can resume work. But once they get to the 100 Acre Wood, they've lost track of everyone else and whether he wants to or not, Christopher Robin winds up looking for them. And along the way, he does find his inner child, which he had lost over the years where he'd had to be become a responsible adult.
Acting, Writing and Adaptation
As far as the writing goes, it's really well done. All the characters pretty much act the way you'd expect them to. While Christopher Robin is happy to see old friends again, he is very much trying to hold onto his new life and not lose sight of responsibility. There's always going to be a moment in these types of movies where a fight happens between characters for wanting different things. But they handled this well with him and Pooh- this is a kid's movie, after all. It's not like he's going to curse him out or say anything demeaning to him.
It may be a little cheesy how Christopher Robin winds up playing again... apparently everyone is hiding because they think a Hufflelump is out to get them and he pretends to scare one away... in anything but a Disney movie, how he acts would be considered more than a bit ridiculous. Yet here, it works... at least I think so.
For the most part, the characters are just how we remember them. Owl is a know-it-all, but he's not as annoying as I found him in the Kingdom Hearts games where he was pretty much a tutorial giver. Toby Jones was the perfect voice for him. Of course they had Jim Cummings (one of the most versatile voice actors ever... I'd known his name as long as I'd been learning names) playing Pooh and Tigger and doing them as well as you'd expect from him. I read one review that was maybe a bit cynical, but he had one thing right where Pooh kinda looks like zen riddles. He is a bear of little brain, but he knows a lot more about life than you'd expect.
And Tigger is just Tigger... we even get that dang song where he says why Tiggers are wonderful... just HAD to have that in the movie. And like with the old cartoons, of course he does something kinda stupid to screw up the story and the other characters have to go through the portal to London to make it right, but once we get to the end of it, you can't argue with the result because it saves Christopher Robin as part of his family as well as his job.
Brad Garrett was a good fit to voice Eeyore. However, I'm a little conflicted with how he was presented as a character. Some of his sarcasm was pretty funny and the audience got a kick out of them. (One of those moments was mocking Tigger's song pretty much saying "Not again..."). I mean, we all know Eeyore is very downtrodden and depressed and sarcastic. But some of his lines, to me, come off just a tad passive-aggressive just short of being mean-spirited. It's a little difficult to describe unless you actually see it for yourself, but he didn't quite sound like this in his original form.
Piglet is true to form, but it's hard hearing anyone else play him other than John Fielder, who passed away some time ago (2005, wow... that long?). Nobody could play Piglet better, but I really liked how the character was pretty much the same as we remember... other than the fact he was dressed in blue instead of his iconic pink/red outfit.
Kanga and Roo didn't have as many lines, but their actors nailed their parts.
I think the only voice actor I didn't like was who they got to play Rabbit. I think because it was a very British actor. And the cartoon really didn't have any British actors other than Christopher Robin himself. But the story did take play in England, so that's probably what they should have done in the first place. The actor played one of the many incarnations of Doctor Who, so definitely fitting for this role. But to me, it just sounded weird and out of place. (Maybe because Rabbit was my favorite character cuz I loved rabbits as a kid...)
And Ewan McGregor was great in this role. It feels like a long time since I'd seen him and I hadn't seen him in anything like this. Where he's an everyday man who happens to have animated stuffed animals for friends.
HIs wife and daughter were done well also. Of course we know Hayley Atwell as Agent Carter so it was cool to see her again in a normal role, but it's another where her loved one fought in the war. (I don't know if this was World War I or II in this particular movie). And Madeline was adorable as his daughter. He wants her to go to the same private school he did and to study all the time. But all she wants to do play as a kid and read stories like Treasure Island at bedtime, opposed to dusty old history books.
The fact Evelyn and Madeline get to meet the character and interact with them was great and really made the whole thing worth it at the end.
Final Comments
Overall, you get what you pay for. It's a live action Disney movie with beloved characters we all grew up with. They got a good story true to form and they were portrayed really well. And the story was well-written and didn't color outside of the lines too much to take away from the nostalgia and everything we grew up with. So I thought it was nice and sweet. And certainly well worth leaving the house and spending money on a movie ticket for. Not much is getting me to the movies anymore, so I thought it was worth it. Is it worth a movie ticket for other people? It's up for them to decide, I think.
It's kinda too bad that the movie only made $24.5 million... but nowadays, unless it's a Marvel or Star Wars movie (at least pre-Solo... still didn't think it was THAT bad where they had to derail all of the side-mode movies to regroup), movies aren't bringing in lots of money anymore. Half of it is lack of originality, but the other half is probably this ridiculous trend of streaming off Netflix and similar companies. I went around looking for a new CD and not only did nobody carry it, but the CD collections at all the stores but FYE were very minimal. Some dude probably my age or younger at Best Buy said they stopped selling CD's cuz one CD is worth 3-months of Spotify. If I was more secure with myself, I probably would have started an argument with him over it. I don't buy many CD's anymore, but that's so not the point :P Anyway, that's it.
Score: A- (it wasn't anything spectacular or ground-breaking, but I liked it enough where I'd watch it again for sure)
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